Clearly, there’s no shortage of health data or technologies, esp. following ACA’s requirements of uniform data collection standards, just a continuing kerfuffle with overlaying disparate JSON/OGC tiles from their many data owners and manifold service endpoints. Unfortunately, only part of this problem is technical. Take Flu mapping, for instance. CDC, WHO, WebMD (with MapBox) and Google, even Walgreens does it. Or take HIV mapping where you can choose from CDC and NMQF, among others. Even anonymized private claims data is available for a couple of Ks a month. I think a bigger part of the problem is the misalignment between vendors’ business interests and mandates of variousagencies and goals of the health research community at large.

Connect

At some point, researchers and epidemiologists would want to see how these data tiles correlate to each other. And GIS professionals would want a quicker way to ‘overlay this layer’ with out having to dig through Firebug. And compress it over the wire, while you are at it (when our users in remote Africa were asked to switch off their smartphones to view desktop maps, we understood data compression a little differently).

Crunch

And then they would want to analyze them, be it on the server with BigData or in the client with smallerones. On analyses, your favorite GIS continues to take heat from tools like Tableau among conference attendees.

Overall, a growing use of ArcGIS Server’s publisher functionalities and a compelling body of story map templates leveraging its narrative text capabilities. E.g. Atlas for Geographic Variation within Medicare. On publishing, I suspect some researchers would like to see a Mapbox plugin for QGIS. Yes, you can render and uploads maps from TileMill to your Mapbox account, but CartoDB has QgisCartoDB where you can view, create, edit or delete data from QGIS to your CartoDB account (I needn’t add that Python-powered QGIS remains a favorite among matplotlib-loving researchers).

++ While log analyses attest that mono-themed web maps provide a better user experience, given the nature of health data and the costs behind spinning off another mapp (yup, blended words to make a portmanteau), sometimes you just have to combine themes.